He’s back

Anxiety/panic and confusion over everything back very badly after an event two nights ago. Very hard to move or speak without hurting me or others, who understandably get frustrated, or talk coherently about what’s hurting. Wolf Dread came back and is baying for blood, taking snaps out of me. Thoughts of the most terrible outcomes and endings. Triggers; triggers, illness and sleeplessness. Stay in bed.
Maybe this is exhastion after staying up too late for too many nights talking to people who seem to have the key to my prison. What to do if you have to choose between fitness of mind and body? Maybe it’s an aftershock of a very quiet and lovely visit from friends yesterday, with no more exertion than sitting, watching TV, and talking – which means my life really is going to be very limited from now on; maybe it’s the 36 hours of anxiety over issues I can’t write about here. Maybe it’s illness: the distortional games CFS/M.E. likes to play on your brain chemicals, just for kicks. Or maybe it’s just how things are. But it’s so mean, after all the hope of the last week, and I feel it’s all my fault, for whatever reason I can find at the time.
Fear of sounding like teenage goth, so won’t type much more. Maybe type on another dry topic later to try and sound literate and detached, to attempt some real mental detachment. Stephen Fry said once (I paraphrase) “if you want to be something else, you just have to keep pretending to be it, until it’s you”. But this is closer to real-me: when you see those entries, that’ll be journo-me.
I say closer because I wouldn’t want you to see me in the hateful flesh now: barely coherent. Senses gathered briefly when my hands touch the keyboard, and wildly reeling when the efforts over, rests between each sentence. Not nice to be with.
It’s very hard to be truthful like this with the world watching (where my world is a few people). Please forgive me for my choppy-changy moodswings, and what seems like self-indulgence. It may be so: it’s just that I can’t tell, and hurt too much just now to be able to find out, or really do anything. This entry is a limited edition 7″, and may disappear at any time, through sheer humiliation. Who wants to read this?
My uncle wrote to me unexpectedly yesterday – we haven’t talked for years. He’s really a second cousin, and the remaining link to my mum who’s gone (her cousin and childhood companion). I dream about telling her she had a daughter all this time, because I know she would have opened her arms to it. I hope he won’t mind me quoting his letter:

You are in dire straits, without much wriggle-room, though I guess loving outsiders, perplexed by their helplessness are reduced to affirming platitudes and detachable encouragements which presuppose a kind of freedom and energy available to them but not to you. What, where is the key?

“We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”

I think of what people do in prison. Immense numbers of press-ups. Messages tapped out on walls or pipes. Treatises written on bog-paper. The gratifying fantasies of revenge. Commonplace rotting. I also recall (from childhood) that Bunyan’s Giant Despair is given periodic fits (just as hope itself) so that in a brief lapse of his tyranny the victims find the key that was with them all along in the dungeon.

I guess you have to wriggle-wriggle with what you have available to you, not the contents of platitudes beyond your reach, disqualified by your reality. All the time the choice of life over death is set before us. In some prisons, wriggling may be the only affirmation of choice.

P.S. There is a moment in each day that Satan cannot reach – William Blake

I dream of stumbling across some fragment of that gene of eloquence that he’s always possessed in some dusty attic of my mind one day. He probably won’t see this as I doubt he has internet connectivity these days – he prefers lonely estuaries to bustle – but his letter bears reading and re-reading for me. I don’t know if he’d be able to adjust to some of the revelations of this weblog, if he saw it. He once said to me with a huge air of sadness, when we discussed the loss of faith I, and he to a greater degree had suffered, that he was “last century’s man”. It was terrible to hear – his despair at the time. I hope he doesn’t think that still – he isn’t. Every century needs this kind of care and eloquence. I don’t talk to him enough, probably because I feel the weight of a childhood staring out of the wrong face at him, with the wrong assumptions coming back at me when I do, which is hardly his or anyone’s fault. Maybe this might change, if I tell him one day. Meanwhile, I’ll sit still, and wait for one of those lapses of tyranny. His Giant – my Wolf.

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Nothing is done without difficulty;
Face difficulties courageously and with humour;
Every life has its hardships and frustrations;
Courage is not only necessary for saints,
it is necessary for any well lived life.Saint Emily